For some the world is dotted with endless destinations, in control of the search for their own definition of belonging; others are forced to flee or are otherwise immobilised, in either case losing that right of choosing. Inevitably we have mostly become an increasingly transnational society, seeking a place we can confidently call home.

This project attempts to express the dichotomy between belonging and estrangement, which provokes degrees of easiness and anxiety in our daily lives.

We swing between modes of pure presence, an active experience of our surroundings and states of reflection, where we withdraw ourselves from the world and delve into the realm of memories and interpretations. The work began by looking at the photo album, a physical and portable collection of moments descriptive of a culture, with the power of conveying with ease a narrow insight of one's life, representative of a home - place. The photo album suggests the ritual of looking, of turning the same pages over and over again, strengthening the notion that repetition makes it harder to forget. The object was explored through three movements that characterise its very ritual: opening, turning, sliding. The understanding of the expression of degrees of intensity and states of being through movements learned in the above exercise lead to the exploration of the Laban efforts, and eventually to the articulation of a choreography of 36 actions, which seek to describe the shift between a state of tranquillity to one of distress, enhanced by the gradual variation in exposure from light to dark of the prints. The printing technique attempts to bend the conventional idea of a photograph as a clear mirror of the world. The camera was set on a self timer at slow shutter speed. Each print is a double exposure, achieved by exposing one frame over an other in pairs of two moving the negative through the enlarger from frame 1 to 36. Frame 2 is exposed over frame 1, frame 3 over frame 2 and so on and vice versa, making use of the full roll, twice. The exposure time of each print increases according to the intensity of the movement. The images are arranged in two lines, alluding to two journeys.

These opposing gradient lines suggest the uncertainty of belonging, the actions, also organised in opposite directions, almost overlap in the middle, not quite striking balance due to the even number of frames.